MEDIA ADVISORY – International Linear Collider to take next step

The Global Design Effort and ILC Research Directorate, the international planning team for the International Linear Collider (ILC), will hand over the draft of the ILC Technical Design Report (TDR) to its internal oversight board ILC Steering Committee (ILCSC) in an official ceremony to be held in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan on 15 December 2012 at 14:00 h JST. This marks the first step towards the completion of the final design for the ILC project.

After several years of intensive research and development work on accelerator and detector technologies, as well as in-depth internal reviews of both the accelerator and detector reports, the TDR will be handed over to Jonathan Bagger, the chair of the International Linear Collider Steering Committee, at the official handover ceremony.

An external review of the TDR on the technical design for the accelerator and a detailed baseline design for the two detectors will have been carried out by the international committee of technical experts in the days just preceding the ceremony at High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan. A separate cost review on TDR will be done in January, and the results of these reviews will be presented to ILCSC in Vancouver in February 2013 at a joint meeting of ILCSC and the new Linear Collider Board, a new oversight committee for the Linear Collider Collaboration that will take up office at the same time.

The Linear Collider Collaboration will combine the two linear collider projects, ILC and CLIC, under one organisational roof. After this review, the final version of the TDR will be officially delivered to the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA) in June 2013.

Following the handover ceremony on 15 December in Akihabara, Tokyo, there will be a panel discussion on the past, present and future of the ILC from various perspectives of eminent scientists and business leaders, moderated by Hitoshi Murayama, Director, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU).

There will be a Q&A session for press after the panel discussion, with Barry Barish, Sakue Yamada, Jonathan Bagger and Atsuto Suzuki. This will happen at around 15:00 JST. The event and press conference will be streamed live and journalists unable to attend in person have the opportunity to ask questions via ustream. Please see details below for more information.

The Global Design Effort (GDE), ILC Research Directorate (RD), the Japanese Advanced Accelerator Association promoting Science and Technology (AAA), and Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) will jointly host this event.

Media who wish to attend or require more information on this event should contact Rika Takahashi, ILC Communicator Asia, at +81-29-879-6247 or communicators@linearcollider.org.

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About International Linear Collider
The International Linear Collider (ILC) is a proposed future international particle accelerator. It would create high-energy particle collisions between electrons and positrons, their antimatter counterparts. The ILC would provide a tool for scientists to address many of the most compelling questions of the 21st century-questions about dark matter, dark energy, extra dimensions and the fundamental nature of matter, energy, space and time. From its inception, the ILC would be designed, funded, managed and operated as an international scientific project. It complements the existing Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN in its science programme.
More information: www.linearcollider.org.

About Global Design Effort
The Global Design Effort is an international team of scientists and engineers, who sets the design and priorities for building the next-generation particle accelerator – the International Linear Collider. The research and development work was done by many hundreds of experts from all over the world.

About ILC Research Directorate
The research directorate is responsible for the development of the experimental programme of the ILC. In particular, this includes, as specified by the charge drafted by the ILCSC, developing two validated detector designs.

About ILC Steering Committee (ILCSC)
The primary role of the International Linear Collider Steering Committee is to promote the construction of the International Linear Collider through world-wide collaboration. Its 15 members define the scope and primary parameters for the machine and its detectors, monitor the R&D activities, and make recommendations on the coordination and sharing of R&D tasks. The ILCSC was established by ICFA in order to facilitate global support for the realisation of the International Linear Collider (ILC) as a global collaborative effort. The ILCSC established the Global Design Effort (GDE) central team to coordinate and direct the effort of the teams in Asia, Europe and the Americas that comprise the GDE.